Christopher Fowler is one of those gifted authors endowed with all the above qualities, a terrific storyteller whose stories are a real treat for anyone seeking after enjoyable, entertaining but thought-provoking fiction. His latest collection �Old Devil Moon� assembles twenty-two new tales varying in length, style and tone, but sharing the common ground of a dark view of the world with its dramas and its little, unfathomable mysteries.

Among the best stories are �The Threads�, where an Englishman touring North Africa with his wife pays a high price for his dishonesty and greed, �Take It All Out, Put It All Back� , a bitter parable probing the secrets of Lady Luck�s unpredictable whims, and the delightful �The Lady Downstairs� a pastiche featuring Sherlock Holmes� landlady trying her hand as an assistant detective. �Identity Crisis� is an upsetting exercise in psychological and sexual ambiguity, while �Exclusion Zone� is a grim tale of urban horror and generational conflict.

Some stories have a cruel undertone such as �Red Torch� , a brief crude report of how a young boy loses his innocence in a movie theatre and �Forcibly Bewitched,� a piece portraying a man too trustful in other people�s forgiveness and too na�ve to play with ancient spells.

The comedy of life is well represented in �Heredity�, where an unwanted pregnancy turns a young woman into the parlourmaid of an old lady. Deception and disappointment will eventually lead to an unexpected happy ending.

�All Packed� is a wonderfully deceiving tale depicting with a delicate touch a man on the verge of leaving for a trip he would never want to take. In the excellent, gloomy �Invulnerable� a woman reminiscing about her teens and her fondness for Superman comics remembers an episode that changed her life forever.

My favourite story is �The Twilight Express,� an outstanding piece full of melancholy in which a young man wary of becoming a father learns too late life�s true values.

After seventeen novels and nine short story collections Fowler continues to exhibit his extraordinary imagination, his disturbing ability to reveal the darkest corners of our existence and to describe them in an elegant, irresistible prose.

A highly recommendable volume.

Mario Guslandi was born and raised in Milan, Italy, where he�s currently living. He became addicted to horror and supernatural fiction more than twenty years ago, after accidentally reading a reprint anthology of stories by MR James, JS Le Fanu, HP Lovecraft and A Machen. Since then his collection of horror books has expanded to the point of requiring continuous addictions of new shelves to his library, in order to avoid the collapse of the whole structure. Most likely the only Italian who regularly reads (and reviews) dark fiction in English, he�s always tempted to hide his true identity under feigned English or american pen-names, just for the fun of it, but then he keeps forgetting to do that.